At present, a variety of terminal products, also known as user equipment (UE), are available on the market, and appear in multiple forms, such as a mobile phone, a tablet computer, a desktop computer, and a television (TV). Hardware capabilities, such as a screen size and screen resolution, of these user equipment are different. In addition, software capabilities, such as a supported media format and an operating system, may also be different. A same type of user equipment, such as mobile phones, may even differ in software and hardware capabilities.
Because hardware capabilities are inconsistent, most applications (APPs) cannot be automatically compatible. To improve a resource utilization ratio of a user equipment and experience of users using different user equipment, designers provide different software versions, such as a mobile phone version or a tablet computer version, for different types of user equipment. For example, after a mobile phone of a user downloads an application from an application server, if the user wants to apply the application to a tablet computer of the user, the user manually needs to further download a corresponding version on the tablet computer; and if the user wants to apply the application to a TV of the user, the user needs to further download another corresponding version on the TV manually.
For a same application, different versions need to be manually selected to be downloaded for different user equipment. The foregoing method for downloading an application is not flexible enough.